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‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,’ Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker

Image of Fascists Mussolini and Hitler
Saluted by Fascists.
Israeli Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi speaks on March 9, 2021. (Photo: Nissim Vaturi/Facebook)

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi is one of many Israeli leaders who have made genocidal statements against Palestinians.

Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire Friday after asserting on social media that Israel’s war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is “too humane.”

“All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing,” Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote Friday after the country’s war Cabinet approved extremely limited fuel deliveries into the besieged strip. “We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, no less!”

“Don’t allow fuel in, don’t allow water in until the hostages are returned back!” Vaturi added, a reference to the approximately 240 Israelis and others kidnapped by Hamas-led militants during the October 7 infiltration attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.

When Israeli journalist Ben Caspit responded to the post with a comment that he feared Vaturi’s words could fuel “anti-Israel propaganda,” the lawmaker shot back: “Your fear will kill us. Stop being humane.”

The social media platform X—whose multibillionaire owner Elon Musk is in hot water for promoting an anti-semitic post—deleted Vaturi’s tweet, and others including one in which he wrote that Israel should leave just “one old man” alive in Gaza so he could “tell everyone” what happened there.

Vaturi recently pushed for the suspension of colleague Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the leftist Hadash party, for comments critical of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and for calling for the protection of civilians on both sides, including by saying that “a child is a child,” whether Israeli or Palestinian.

Over 5,000 Palestinian children are among the more than 12,300 people killed during Israel’s 43-day bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has also maimed at least 30,000 others, according to Gazan health officials. Half the homes in the embattled strip have been damaged or destroyed, with around 1.7 million Palestinians forcibly displaced. Thousands of people are missing and feared buried beneath rubble. In the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7, while over 2,800 others have been arrested.

Vaturi is far from alone in making what legal experts call statements of genocidal intent.

Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a member of the Knesset from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “Gaza should be wiped off the map.”

Ariel Kallner, another Likud parliamentarian, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.

Yet another Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, demanded nothing less than a “doomsday kiss”—that is, use of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons. “Not flattening a neighborhood,” she clarified, but “crushing and flattening Gaza. Without mercy!”

Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who said “we are now rolling out the Great Nakba,” was admonished by Netanyahu for saying the quiet part out loud.

Netanyahu said it out loud last month during a televised address when he called Israel’s imminent ground invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked Amalek, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites whom God commanded his “chosen people” to exterminate, in what critics called “an explicit call to genocide.”

Noting that statements of intent to commit genocide are a key element of the crime, Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal toldDemocracy Now! in an interview last month that “if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.”

“We’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent,” he added. “This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.”

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,’ Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker

Palestinians File ‘Urgent Motion’ to Stop Biden From Backing Genocide

Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr
Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion.”

A group of Palestinian Americans on Thursday urged a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from providing any additional weaponry or diplomatic support to the Israeli military as it carries out mass atrocities in Gaza.

The “urgent motion” comes days after the group, represented by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a federal court in California, arguing that the top officials are “failing to prevent an unfolding genocide where they have influence over the state of Israel to do so, and directly abetting its development with weapons, funds, and diplomatic cover” in violation of international law.

The plaintiffs in the case are U.S. citizens with family in Gaza, which has been under relentless assault since a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last month. At least 116 of the plaintiffs’ family members have been killed in the Palestinian enclave since the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza began.

“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, an attorney at CCR, said Thursday. “There is no starker illustration of how urgently this injunction is needed.”

The Biden administration has opposed calls for a cease-fire and pledged unconditional support to the Israeli government as it wages war on the besieged Gaza Strip with the help of U.S. weaponry, including thousands of Hellfire missiles and army vehicles. That support has continued in the face of a horrific death toll and humanitarian crisis and amid global alarm over Israeli officials’ genocidal rhetoric.

In an emergency briefing paper released less than two weeks into Israel’s assault, CCR warned that the U.S. “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”

The lawsuit filed earlier this week echoes that case, stating that the “unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support given by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”—Biden, Blinken, and Austin.

The lawsuit and push for a preliminary injunction are backed by leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, including William Schabas, a world-renowned expert on international human rights law.

In a declaration supporting the lawsuit, Schabas wrote, “There is a serious risk of genocide committed against the Palestinian population of Gaza and that the United States of America is in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the Government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place.”

The new motion was submitted Thursday as Israel raided Gaza’s largest hospital and prepared for an assault on the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, prompting fears of a widening military campaign.

Meanwhile, little humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter the blockaded territory, leaving millions of lives at risk as most of the population lacks water, food, medicine, and other basic necessities.

The World Food Program warned Thursday that “nearly the entire population” of Gaza “is in desperate need of food assistance.”

“The small quantities of food that can be found are being sold at alarmingly inflated prices and are of little use without the ability to cook, forcing some to survive on one meal a day,” the U.N. organization said. “For the lucky, that includes more than solely canned food, though some people have resorted to consuming raw onions and uncooked eggplants.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingPalestinians File ‘Urgent Motion’ to Stop Biden From Backing Genocide

EU to Criminalize Acts ‘Comparable to Ecocide’

Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“With this agreement, the European Union adopts some of the most ambitious legislation in the world,” one MEP who backed the measure said.

In what one proponent called a “fundamental victory,” the European Union agreed late Thursday to set new penalties for acts of environmental destruction “comparable to ecocide.”

The update to an E.U. directive, which targets wide-scale actions like habitat destruction and illegal logging, makes the bloc the first multinational group to criminalize these acts, The Guardian reported.

“Environmental crime is exploding around the world, it is now considered just as lucrative as drug trafficking, and is helping to destroy living conditions on Earth,” Marie Toussaint, a French lawyer and member of European Parliament who helped steer the negotiations, said in a statement. “With this agreement, the European Union adopts some of the most ambitious legislation in the world. We will continue to fight so that we can never again harm living things in the name of profit.”

“Our health depends on the state of the environment in which we live, so we must deter criminals willing to destroy ecosystems for profit.”

The new offense comes in the wake of a growing movement to have ecocide recognized as an international crime. The original call from the Stop Ecocide Foundation was for it to be added to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on equal footing with genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. In 2021, the group assembled legal experts to draft a definition, which has generated interest on the national level as well. Bills have been introduced in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

“We’re one step closer to stopping the destruction of our planet,” Giulio Carini, communications manager at WeMove Europe, said in a statement Friday. “With today’s proposal we’ve secured a text that paves the way to ensure we can protect nature through criminal law. This progress is a result of people-powered pressure—after more than 600,000 people across Europe have asked the E.U. to make ecocide a crime.”

Thursday’s agreement comes after the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee unanimously proposed in March that “member states shall ensure that any conduct causing severe and either widespread or long-term or irreversible damage shall be treated as an offense of particular gravity and sanctioned as such in accordance with the legal systems of the member states.”

This then led to months of negotiations between the parliament, the European Council, and the European Commission that have resulted in the decision to update the “directive on protection of the environment through criminal law” to include new penalties for especially devastating environmental harms.

“We are thrilled to see this result,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Stop Ecocide International, said in a statement. “The approved text is a hugely important step and a massive win for nature, significantly strengthening environmental protection through criminal law throughout the E.U.”

The actions singled out by the text include destroying the ozone layer, introducing or spreading invasive species, water abstraction, and shipping pollution and recycling, The Guardian reported. The agreement does not mention carbon credit scams, fishing, or exporting dangerous waste to developing countries. It also does not cover crimes committed by E.U. companies abroad, though individual states may chose to penalize them.

The updated directive could also penalize permitted activities if those permits were acquired through bribes, falsehoods, or threats, or violated legal agreements. Penalties include prison time for individuals or barring companies from receiving public funds in the future. E.U. countries can also chose to fine companies with a set amount of up to €40 million Euros ($43.6 million) or up to 5% of their income.

“Our health depends on the state of the environment in which we live, so we must deter criminals willing to destroy ecosystems for profit,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, E.U. commissioner for environment, oceans, and fisheries, as The Guardian reported.

The E.U. will officially pass the new directive in the spring of 2024, after which member states have two years to enshrine it in their own legal codes.

“This is highly significant and to be wholeheartedly commended, and we can see from the rapidly growing momentum of the ecocide law initiative that European states will not be long in engaging more deeply with it in their own jurisdictions,” Mehta said. “Indeed, I have no doubt that with this direction of travel being rapidly established, it is only a matter of time before ecocide is recognized in criminal law at every level.”

Continue ReadingEU to Criminalize Acts ‘Comparable to Ecocide’

Probe Demanded Over ‘Absurd’ Israeli Narrative About Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital

2023.10.08 Pro-Palestinian Rally, Washington DC. Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
2023.10.08 Pro-Palestinian Rally, Washington DC. Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and ill and injured civilians,” said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

A human rights monitor in Geneva on Friday called on the United Nations to help get to the bottom of Israel’s claim that its bombing and raid of Gaza’s largest medical complex this week was necessary to stop Hamas from running a vast military compound beneath it—an allegation that more than two days after the attack began, has been backed up only by images Israel released of a small cache of weapons.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the time has come for an independent international investigation into “Israel’s absurd narrative” about al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, and noted that administrators at the facility are also demanding a probe “that includes a United Nations inspection.”

Israel did extensive damage to al-Shifa’s cardiac care department, surgical ward, and a pharmaceutical warehouse when it began bombing the hospital at dawn on Wednesday in just one of more than 245 attacks on medical facilities in Gaza since October 7. Israeli officials said they expected to find “the beating heart” of Hamas’ military operations in the hospital.

But after searching basement areas and several health departments as well as conducting a “violent interrogation campaign” targeting displaced people and medical personnel, Euro-Med said, Israel has so far produced only a video showing a small number of weapons.

“The absence of any neutral international party’s involvement in the Israeli military raids and searches of al-Shifa Medical Complex and other hospitals in the strip raises widespread doubts about the Israeli narrative,” said Euro-Med. “Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and ill and injured civilians.”

“We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water. With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons.”

Separately, the BBC aired a segment on Friday in which the network noted the Israel Defense Forces first released a seven-minute video displaying the weapons it found—a video that appeared to be edited despite IDF claims that it was filmed in a single shot with no edits, and that raised several other questions.

“This IDF video was posted, then deleted, then reposted, this time without a section referring to an Israeli soldier who’d been held hostage,” reported the BBC.

Reporters from the network arrived at al-Shifa a few hours after the IDF released the original video, and were shown a different selection of weapons than those that appeared in the military’s video.

“What we see in this IDF video doesn’t equate Israel’s description of an ‘operational command center for Hamas,'” the BBC reported.

The footage, released late at night “after long hours of searches and fruitless inspections,” said Euro-Med, “raises a lot of questions, especially since no gunman has been arrested and no evidence has been found to back the previous claims about the presence of tunnels beneath the hospital.”

The IDF has also claimed that Hamas “knew we were coming” and had likely “made off with or hidden traces of their presence” at al-Shifa, The New York Times reported.

Israel’s narrative about al-Shifa has also drawn scrutiny from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, who said that even if the hospital were being used as a command center for Hamas, “protecting [patients] is paramount.”

“Even if health facilities are used for military purposes, the principles of distinction, precaution, and proportionality always apply,” Tedros said.

The director of al-Shifa, Muhammed Abu Salmiya, toldAl Jazeera Friday that staff are still trying to save as many of the 7,000 patients and refugees in the hospital as they can amid Israel’s ongoing siege, but they “lost all those who were in the intensive care unit” following the attack on Wednesday.

“We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water,” said Abu Salmiya. “With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons.”

The Biden administration, which has continued supporting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as the death toll has grown to at least 11,470 in less than six weeks, said this week it believed the IDF’s claims about al-Shifa, with President Joe Biden saying it was a “fact” that Hamas has “their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital.”

A day after the bombing, as observers awaited evidence of an extensive command center beneath the hospital, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller appeared less confident in Israel’s narrative, telling reporters that the White House “never said there were command posts in every hospital in Gaza.”

“We don’t want to see hospitals struck from the air,” said Miller. “We understand that Hamas continues to use hospitals in places where they embed their fighters.”

After the BBC reported on the IDF’s changing video documentation of its findings, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft called Israel’s “propaganda” supporting its onslaught in Gaza “increasingly clownish.”

“Only Joe Biden seems to believe it,” said Parsi.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out that Israel itself is known to have built “an underground operating room and tunnels under the hospital” in 1983.

“This is not a secret,” Scahill wrote on social media, noting that Israel has claimed Hamas expanded the tunnels in recent years.

Allegations of a Hamas command center, supported by the U.S., said Scahill, “should be backed up by clear evidence, not a Geraldo Rivera/Al Capone’s vault-style video presentation featuring an English-speaking IDF soldier.”

“No matter what is or is not found, there is no justification for the repeated attacks against civilian hospitals—in fact al-Shifa is the largest hospital treating the most vulnerable people in Gaza, including NICU babies,” he added. “The mere existence of tunnels, originally built by Israel, does not prove the specific allegations made by the U.S. or Israel. The standard for such evidence should be very, very high.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingProbe Demanded Over ‘Absurd’ Israeli Narrative About Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital

Big Oil’s Big Lies Are Catching Up With Them

Climate protestors march in Washington DC
Climate protestors march in Washington DC

Original article by Cassidy Dipaola republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The American public believes fossil fuel companies should pay for their deceit. Our job is to make sure they do.

For decades, the fossil fuel industry has misled the public about the climate impacts of its products. Internal documents prove companies like Exxon knew since the 1970s that burning oil and gas drives catastrophic global warming. Yet rather than warn society, they denied the science and obstructed climate action at every turn.

This corporate deception continues today, but the public is catching on in a big way. New polling from Data for Progress reveals 70% of Americans support making Big Oil pay for the climate damages their products have caused. With climate disasters growing in frequency and severity, people are fed up footing the bill for Big Oil’s greed.

Such greed should disgust us all. But outrage alone achieves nothing.

Critically, the American public believes Big Oil should pay for their lies. The new polling reveals that 77% of Americans agree that if oil and gas companies misled the public about climate impacts, they should help cover resulting climate costs. This consensus crosses political divisions. Agreement spans 91% of Democrats, 75% of Independents, and 63% of Republicans—an exceptionally high level of bipartisan agreement.

The poll also shows a sharp rise in support for making polluters pay over time. Similar polls in 2021 and 2019 found roughly 60% and 57% of Americans backed accountability, respectively. In just a few short years, support for accountability has jumped nearly 20 percentage points. Now near three-quarters of Americans are in agreement around the belief that Big Oil should pay for the harms it sowed through decades of deception.

The costs of warming are no longer abstract statistics. They can be seen in the devastation of communities across America. In 2021 alone, extreme weather fueled by climate change inflicted over $165 billion in damages nationwide. Floods, wildfires and storms killed hundreds and displaced countless more. Low income and minority communities suffered most, abandoned by the very corporations who caused this crisis.

At the same time these climate impacts accelerate, the fossil fuel industry is raking in massive profits. Just last quarter, Chevron pocketed $11.2 billion and Exxon secured $19.7 billion. Rather than invest in renewables or pay for the harms they’ve caused, they’re doubling down on fossil fuels, scooping up sister-companies and stoking fears of monopolization in the public and leadership alike.

New lawsuits are seeking damages for Big Oil’s climate deception, and they’re gaining traction.

By misleading the public on climate science for so long, the industry secured decades of unchecked emissions to swell its bottom line. But now, the deadly consequences of its lies are coming to bear. Record heat, drought and near-weekly hurricanes make clear we rapidly must transition from fossil fuels to avert utter climate catastrophe.

The public correctly realizes these corporations should pay for the crisis they knowingly fueled. Our leaders must stand up to polluters and enact policies to rein in their abuses. A future free from fossil fuels is possible, and we now have the political will to make it happen.

Original article by Cassidy Dipaola republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Cassidy DiPaola is the Spokesperson and Campaign Manager for the Stop The Oil Profiteering Campaign at Fossil Free Media.

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Continue ReadingBig Oil’s Big Lies Are Catching Up With Them